Re: What is the easiest nation to play?
 

This is the map that I used to transition from a flailing newbie, to a confident newbie. ;) I got tired of being ganged, so I made a somewhat balanced 4 player map, marked everything No Start except for fairly equal starting spots in the corners.

If anyone reads this thread (Akela or not) and thinks it could be useful, here you go. :happy:

Re: What is the easiest nation to play?
 

I have some notes about using a generator such as ParadoxHarbringers to create a small tilable map, then copying it 4 times reversing each time to get an unfolded napkin type of EXACTLY matched map. It wont work too well with Dom3 generated maps so I put it off but I think it would be well received.

Re: What is the easiest nation to play?
 

Hm, I see the usual suspects mentioned here. However, I might suggest that the nation a player starts with sometimes colors their view of the game. I would therefore give a slightly more varied nation. (Man and Ulm, particularly, are not very varied.)

I would suggest Midgard. Einhere spam is incredibly easy to do, and leads to easy expansion. You _can_ look into Blood, but don't have to. You _can_ do buffing by Volvas, or Battlemagic from the Galdermen, but don't have. Basically, this is a nation that you can give to a newbie and expect them to do well, but also something they can progress with for more than a few games.

Re: What is the easiest nation to play?
 

As an added bonus, there is an incredibly well written and insightful guide for Midgard. It really is a work art, so check it out, newbies and pros alike.

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=38147

Re: What is the easiest nation to play?
 

Against humans or against AI?
LA RLyeh is the strongest nation overall; against AI its overwhelmingly strong, against humans overpowered and nearly impossible to strike back at, but not unstoppable (you lose if you start near Rlyeh though, even if you 'stop' it) :)

Re: What is the easiest nation to play?
 

No, I think midgard is a bad nation for a new player. You are talking about the persons *first game* for goodness sake. They dont need to be able to have the ability to explore additional magic paths. They need to be able to get a handle on the base level complexity that is dominions without the 5234 other moving parts of the game.

We all take it for granted since we have experience with the game. But I remember when I first played and it was totally overwhelming. And I'm no rookie to strategy / empire games! I even gave up on dominions after trying the demo since it was too complicated. Only came back to it some months later out of boredom and finally got hooked. So, the best route for the new player is the easiest, most limited one.

Re: What is the easiest nation to play?
 

Yeah, if I had to lay out a plan to learn the game it would be start with the least magically diverse, non-blood, non-communion nation just to start to get a feel for the basic mechanics without being totally overwhelmed with all the spells to cast and items to build. I remember in my first MP game:
1. confusing resources with supplies and starving my troops
2. making my first pretender an E3W1 cyclops b/c I confused the W symbol with the A and was trying to get E3A1 because I thought Gargoyles would be cool
3. having no idea what to research or why mages would do anything but research (just like real word academics)
4. screwing up scripting repeatedly so watching my hero bolt straight out in front of my troops into the waiting arms of hundreds of O-Bakemonos (ouch)
5. forgetting/not knowing enemy dominion would drop my pathetic cyclops HP like a brick, and then getting him crippled, then killed (doh)

etc. etc. Oh and this was just with MA Ulm before their upgrade.

So its easy to forget how much stuff there is and making it even more complicated with things like communions, blood hunting, mages with 256 permutations of paths, can be overwhelming.

Re: What is the easiest nation to play?
 

Yes, of course. But unless you have decent national mages you would be stuck at the beginning not knowing where and how to get more power for them. And you have to have a decent military, too. So it just seems that MA Ulm wasn't the best nation to start with in any case - you have to know how to utilize their forging abilities...
My own first Dominion death, by the way, had been when I tried to look up two nations simultaneously, had them started as neighbors by random placement and then got one accidentally Dom-killing the other (Titan vs Rainbow)... :)
Another nation that is good for beginners seems to be MA R'lyeh - at least that is what I've started in Dom2 with and it has good enough troops, is somewhat protected by being underwater and already has solid Astral and Water mages with smattering of other paths for future experimentation... ;)

Re: What is the easiest nation to play?
 

Well thanks to all the good advice here I now have two brothers hooked! One to go.

I can tell you from my own experience (1 month now, about 10 games) and the questions I fielded from my brothers that magic is a complete mystery to the brand new player. Like one poster said, we would build mages and put them on research (because that's what Bruce did in the tutuorial) but that's all they would ever do.

You could probably divide magic by effect into 4 main categories. Stuff that modifies combat (buffs/debuffs), direct damage spells, summons and miscellaneous stuff like teleport. All of which are pretty hard for a brand new player to construct a strategy around. The first game seems to be, at least in my limited experience, a matter of moving large masses of troops around the map, watching them fight, and building more of the same.

Re: What is the easiest nation to play?
 

FYI, Marverni is not exactly a good nation to start out with. I'm judging by your sig.